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ADDRESS 



• A V " O" THE 



C C R M E :>STONE 



Douglas Monumen 



•> /i r aire ago, si;p'r;:M£ZR 6, s*sa :| 

I 5 



A. DIX, 



I 

New York : m 
EDWARD F. CROWE N. 

FOR SALE BY £| 

The American Ne-vs Company. 119 and 121 Nassau St, 

1 366. H 



/ 

ADDRESS 

AT THE LAYING OF THE 

CORNER-STONE 

OF THE 

Douglas Monument 

AT CHICAGO, SEPTEMBER 6, 1866. 

BY 

Major-General JOHN A. DIX. 



7 FY 



New York : 
EDWARD F . CROWEN. 

FOR SALE BY 

The American News Company, 119 and 121 Nassau St. 

1866. 



.A 



The New York Printing Company, 
81, 83, and 85 Centre St., 
NEW YORK. 



ORATION. 



Fellow-Citizens — The scene in which we are 
actors to-day, with all its surrounding circum- 
stances and accompanying recollections, has no 
parallel in this or any other age. We are as- 
sembled within the confines of a city numbering 
over two hundred thousand inhabitants, distant one 
thousand miles from the ocean, where thirty-four 
years ago nothing was seen but an unbroken ex- 
panse of prairie on the one side, and the outspread 
waters of Lake Michigan on the other, both extend- 
ing far beyond the compass of the sight ; nothing 
heard but the voice of the great inland sea from 
the sands on which its waves were breaking, or the 
more unwelcomed voices of the savage tribes who 
roamed over these majestic plains. Where, within 
half the span of an ordinary life, there was one vast 
solitude, all is full of activity, and ^progress, and the 
treasures of a polished civilization. Industry and 
the arts display their stores with a bounteousness 



4 



which might well be mistaken for the accumulat- 
ed surpluses of centuries ; science is teaching the 
truths which have been developed by the researches 
of the past, and enlarging the boundaries of human 
knowledge by new discoveries ; education is univer- 
sally diffused ; and, above all, the temples which re- 
ligion has reared to the service of God, from every 
precinct and almost every street of the city, point 
their spires to Heaven, as it were in acknowledg- 
ment of the merciful protection under which it has 
triumphed over all the obstacles to its growth, and 
become strong and self-reliant and prosperous. Fel- 
low-citizens — In no other country of the present, in 
no age of the past, could such a miracle of civiliza- 
tion have been wrought ! And this great city and 
the great West, of which it is, by comparison, but 
an inconsiderable part, have poured out the tens of 
thousands who stand around me, in a mass so ex- 
tended that no human voice could reach your outer 
ranks. You have come here to render the homage 
of your respect to the memory of one, who rose 
among you to the highest eminence for talent and 
for successful labor in your service. And the Chief- 
Magistrate of the Union, who in the council cham- 
bers of the nation stood side by side with him in 
the darkest hour of its peril, and espoused with 
equal zeal and eloquence the cause of their common 
country, when other men, with hearts less stout and 



5 



faith less constant, quailed before the impending 
storm, has come to join with you in this act of 
posthumous honor to an honest, courageous, and 
patriotic statesman, cut off in the fulness of his 
strength, his usefulness, and his fame. Where or 
when has such a concurrence of circumstances ex- 
isted to inspire one with great thoughts, and yet to 
make him, by their very greatness, despair of giving 
them appropriate utterance ? No one need look 
out of his own breast for the impulse which has 
gathered so vast a multitude together — a multitude 
which no other sun shall ever see reassembled. It 
is one of the strongest feelings of our nature to de- 
sire to perpetuate the memory of those who, from 
ties of blood, familiar associations, or valuable ser- 
vices, have become dear to us, and, by the will of 
God, have been separated from us for ever. There 
are thousands within the reach of my voice, who 
have been made painfully conscious of this instinct 
by the bereavements, which the unhappy domes- 
tic conflict just ended has visited upon them. 
When the burden of grief lies heavy on the heart, 
it is the first impulse of our nature to prolong the 
remembrance, to grave into the solid stone which 
shall endure when we have perished, some appro- 
priate thought, or, it may be, the simple names, 
of those we have loved and lost. Kindred to these 
tributes of affection is the debt of gratitude which 



6 



a whole community, represented here in countless 
numbers, has assembled to discharge by the erec- 
tion of a monument, suited in its proportions to the 
great qualities of him whom it is to commemorate ; 
to lay the foundation of the structure which is to 
be piled up, stone upon stone, from the earth be- 
neath our feet into the sky above us; and thus to 
symbolize the eminence to which he rose by his 
genius and his transcendent public services, above 
the plane of elevation where the great mass of his 
contemporaries stood and toiled and struggled in 
the hard battle of life. 

Thirty-three years ago, the year after Chicago 
was founded, a crowd of people were assembled at 
Winchester, in Scott county, in this State, to attend 
a sale of valuable property. When it was about to 
commence a clerk was wanted to keep the accounts, 
and no one could be found who was willing to 
undertake the service. At this moment a youth, 
slender in person and feeble in health, who had 
come on foot from a neighboring town, joined the 
assembled crowd. He was at once singled out by 
the salesman as one competent to the service; and 
at his urgent solicitation, and tempted no doubt by 
the offer of two dollars a day, the youthful stranger 
accepted it. The sale occupied three days ; and be- 
fore it was ended he had won all hearts by his in- 
telligence, his promptitude, his frankness, and his 



urbanity. It was the general judgment that a young 
man of so much promise should not be permitted 
to leave the neighborhood. A school was provided 
for him, and thus as a clerk and a teacher, a stranger 
without friends and without means, not twenty-one 
years of age, relying on the talents God had given 
him, on an industry which never wearied, and a 
courage which never wavered, Stephen Arnold 
Douglas entered upon the great field of his labor in 
the West. It cannot be doubted that among a people 
battling with the hardships of a new country, the 
favorable impression which his first appearance had 
made was confirmed by a knowledge of the difficul- 
ties he had overcome in preparing himself for 
active life. There was no romance in his early years. 
His youth was the history of hard work, and 
of a perpetual struggle to cultivate the talents 
of which he must have become conscious in 
his boyhood. He was born in Brandon, V t., 
on the 23d of April, 181 3. On the first of July 
ensuing, his father died suddenly while hold- 
ing his infant son in his arms. The first four- 
teen years of his life were passed on a farm, with 
such advantages of instruction as the district, school 
afforded. Having no other means of education, he 
apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker, and worked 
two years at his trade, but was compelled to aban- 
don it for want of physical strength. He returned 



8 



to his native town, entered an academy, and devoted 
himself to classical studies for a year. He then re- 
moved to Canandaigua, in New York, and remained 
there three years, continuing his classical studies, 
and for a portion of the time studying the law. In 
all these phases of his youth he evinced the same 
intelligence and the same energy which distin- 
guished his later years. As an apprentice to a cabi- 
net-maker he displayed a remarkable genius for 
mechanics, and, had not nature marked him out for 
eminence in another sphere of action, he might have 
become one of the distinguished artisans of the 
country. In his classical and legal pursuits he ex- 
hibited the same capacity for distinction ; and while 
engaged in the study of the law he completed, to 
use the language of his biographer, " nearly the en- 
tire collegiate course in most of the various branch- 
es required of a graduate in our best universities." 
He is next seen as a clerk in a lawyer's office in 
Cleveland, Ohio ; then travelling in the West in 
pursuit of employment, stopping at Cincinnati, 
Louisville, St. Louis, and Jacksonville, and at last 
making his appearance at Winchester, and com- 
mencing, in the manner already described, his great 
career of usefulness and distinction. There is 
nothing more touching than his brief address to the 
people of Winchester, when he visited that place in 
1858, after having become distinguished in the 



9 



councils of the nation. " Twenty-five years ago," 
he said. " I entered this town on foot, with my coat 
upon my arm, without an acquaintance within a 
thousand miles, and without knowing where I could 
get money to pay a weeks board. Here I made 
the first six dollars I ever earned in my life, and 
obtained the first regular occupation that I ever pur- 
sued. For the first time in my life I felt that the 
responsibilities of manhood were upon me, although 
I was under age, for I had none to advise with, and 
knew none upon whom I had a right to call for 
assistance or friendship." 

Fellow-citizens — The historv of Mr. Douglas 
would not have been congruous, and it might have 
been far less distinguished, but for the hard strug- 
gles of his youth — but for his severe discipline in 
cultivating the intellectual powers with which nature 
had endowed him. We do not consider, when we 
commiserate the trials of the young and unfriended, 
toiling on their weary way to reputation and fortune, 
that it is this very process by which men are made 
successful and great. Spare, then, your sympathy 
for those who in their youth are contending with 
difficulties, and bestow it on those who. with all 
their needs supplied, and without the stimulant of 
want, are in danger of sinking into inaction and 
mediocrity. It is Providence which, in its mercy, 
throws obstacles in the path of him whom it marks 



IO 

out for eminence, that he may gain strength and 
courage and resolution in overcoming them. It is 
thus that the path to greatness is made smooth in 
after-life by the hard trials of our early years. 

At the end of three months Mr. Douglas gave up 
his school at Winchester and commenced the prac- 
tice of the law in Jacksonville. A mere youth him- 
self, he had already given evidence of his fitness to 
be a teacher of men. From this moment he became 
conspicuous throughout the State, and he achieved 
a series of triumphs unexampled in the career of 
any one of his age. At the bar and in the political 
field he took from the outset a leading part, meet- 
ing the ablest and most experienced advocates and 
orators in debate, and always coming out of the in- 
tellectual combats in which he was engaged, with 
increasing reputation. Offices poured in upon 
him in rapid succession. Early in 1835, fourteen 
months after his appearance at Winchester, he was 
chosen by the Legislature of the State, Attorney for 
the First Judicial District; in 1836 he was elected 
a member of the Legislature; in 1837 he was ap- 
pointed Register of the Land Office under the Fe- 
deral Government; and in 1841 he was chosen a 
Judge of the Supreme Court of the State. It is not 
possible within the limits of an address to say more 
than this : that in every position to which he was 
called he maintained the same high standing for 



1 1 

integrity, talent, and courage; and that with every 
advance in the importance of the offices he filled, 
he developed a corresponding power and capacity 
for the discharge of their duties. 

In 1843 he was elected a representative in 
Congress ; and from this period his reputation 
ceased to be local, and became identified with 
the history of the country. His first effort as 
a speaker in the Federal Legislature was as 
effective as his first appearance at Winchester. 
A bill was before the House of Representatives re- 
mitting the fine imposed on General Jackson by the 
Judge of the New Orleans District, after the receipt 
of the intelligence of peace between the United 
States and Great Britain, in February, 1 81 5. Dur- 
ing the siege the General had declared martial 
law, and resisted the execution of a writ of habeas 
corpus issued by the Judge. As soon as peace was 
proclaimed he rescinded the order declaring martial 
law, surrendered himself to the Court, and was 
fined $1,000. The bill before Congress provided 
for refunding the fine. It had been advocated 
chiefly on the score of General Jackson's great ser- 
vices to the country ; and it was conceded that he 
had exercised an arbitrary power, unwarranted by 
the Constitution. Mr. Douglas took different and 
higher ground. He contended that the Judge was 
wrong in imposing the fine, and that the Gene- 



12 



ral did not " assume to himself any authority 
which was not fully warranted by his position, his 
duty, and the unavoidable necessity of the case." 
These positions were maintained with an ability so 
marked as to attract and command general atten- 
tion ; and from that time forth he was ranked with 
the ablest debaters in a body numbering among its 
members some of the most distinguished men in 
the country. It was natural that Mr. Douglas, trained 
as his mind had been from his earliest years to 
habits of self-reliance, should, in dealing with con- 
stitutional questions, strike out from the beaten 
track of interpretation into new paths. The in- 
stance I have cited is not the only one. . In a 
speech in the House of Representatives on the an- 
nexation of Texas, he took the ground that the 
right to acquire territory, one of the most vexed 
questions of constitutional authority, was included 
within the power to admit new States into the 
Union. So at a subsequent period, as Chairman 
of the Committee on Territories in the Senate, he 
contended that the right to establish Territorial 
Governments was also included in the power to 
admit new States. In nearly all preceding discus- 
sions it had been assumed that the right to insti- 
tute governments for the Territories was included 
in the power " to dispose of and make all needful 
rules and regulations respecting the territory or 



13 



other property belonging to the United States." 
The propositions thus advanced by Mr. Douglas 
were stated and defended with his usual clearness 
and force, and they may be considered as consti- 
tuting an essential part of the great body of com- 
mentary by which the exercise of the powers referred 
to is surrounded, and in regard to which divisions 
of opinion will continue to exist, notwithstanding 
the practical interpretation they have received in 
the legislation of the country. 

In 1846, three years after his election to the 
House of Representatives, he was chosen a member 
of the Senate of the United States, and he was 
continued in that body by successive reflections 
until his death, in June, 1861. As a member of 
both bodies, he took part in the discussion of nearly 
every great question, which arose during those 
eighteen years of unexampled agitation and excite- 
ment. His speeches on the annexation of Texas, 
the war with Mexico, our foreign policy, the aggres- 
sions of European States in America, the extension 
of our own territorial limits, the compromise acts 
of 1850, the Oregon, California, Kansas-Nebraska 
and Lecompton controversies, internal improve- 
ments, and incidentally the question of slavery, the 
prolific source of nearly all the agitations of the 
last quarter of a century, and of the civil war, which 
has drenched the country in fraternal .blood, are all 



14 



marked by the clearness, vigor, and boldness which 
were the chief characteristics of his oratory. 

It was, perhaps, in the patriotic but vain attempt 
to calm the prevailing excitement and close up for 
ever the source of the dissensions which had so long 
distracted the country, by the preparation and de- 
fence of the Compromise Measures of 1850, that the 
great ability of Mr. Douglas was more signally dis- 
played than in any other political labor of his life. 
In January, 1850, Mr. Clay introduced into the Sen- 
ate a series of resolutions, hoping that they might be 
made a basis of legislation which would be satisfac- 
tory to the contending parties. While these resolu- 
tions were under consideration, Mr. Douglas, as 
Chairman of the Committee on Territories, intro- 
duced two bills, one for the admission of California 
into the Union as a State, and the other for the 
organization of the Territories of Utah and New 
Mexico, and the adjustment of the boundary ques- 
tion with Texas. In April a Committee of Thirteen, 
with Mr. Clay at its head, was appointed, and all 
propositions concerning the slavery question were 
referred to it. On the 8th of May, Mr. Clay 
reported from the Committee Mr. Douglas's two 
bills combined in one, with a single amendment. 
When introduced by the latter they provided that 
the power of the Territorial Legislature should 
embrace all subjects of legislation consistent with 



15 



the Constitution. As reported by Mr. Clay, the 
slavery question was expressly excepted from the 
power of legislation. This exception was subse- 
quently rescinded, and the bill was passed as 
originally reported by Mr. Douglas. The Com- 
promise Measures, so far as they related to the 
organization of the Territories, were his work, and 
they were founded on the principle that the people 
of the Territories, through their Legislatures, should 
determine the slavery question for themselves, " and 
have the same power over it as over all other 
matters affecting their internal polity." 

These measures, as you all know, though they 
were at the Presidential eleicton of 1852 approved 
by both the great political parties, were far from 
calming the popular excitement. And when Mr. 
Douglas, in 1853, as Chairman of the Committee 
on Territories, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 
it led to a fierce and protracted discussion. The ob- 
ject, as the Committee declared in a special report 
accompanying it, was " to organize all Territories 
in the future upon the principles of the Compromise 
Measures of 1850 ;" and " that these measures were 
intended to have a much broader and enduring 
effect than merely to adjust the disputed question 
growing out of the acquisition of Mexican territory, 
by prescribing certain fundamental principles, 
which, while they adjusted the existing difficulties, 



i6 



would prescribe rules of action in all future time 
when new Territories were to be organized or new 
States to be admitted into the Union ; that the 
principle upon which the Territories of 1850 were 
organized was, that the slavery question should be 
banished from the halls of Congress and the political' 
arena, and referred to the Territories and States 
which were immediately interested in the question, 
and alone responsible for its existence ;" and the 
report concluded by saying "that the bill reported 
by the Committee proposed, to carry into effect these 
principles in the precise language of the Compro- 
mise Measures of 1850." The repeal of the Mis- 
souri Compromise was incorporated into the bill 
at a subsequent period as an amendment, and in 
this form it passed both Houses of Congress and 
became a law in 1854. Whatever differences of 
opinion may exist, or may heretofore have existed 
in regard to these measures, no one at this day will 
call in question the patriotic motive by which Mr. 
Douglas was actuated, his deep anxiety to preserve 
the harmony of the Union, his sincerity, and the 
great intellectual power with which he maintained 
every position he took. No opposition in or out 
of the Senate, no popular clamor, no fear of personal 
consequences, disturbed his equanimity or his 
courage. He threw himself into every arena in 
which he was assailed, and defended himself with 



i7 



an intrepidity and a manly frankness which always 
commanded the respect of those who differed with 
him, and with a vigor which often won them over 
to his own convictions. 

At no period of his life, perhaps, did Mr. Douglas 
appear so remarkable as on an occasion which you 
all remember — when he returned to this city in 
1854, where he had often been received with tri- 
umphant demonstrations of respect, and appointed 
a meeting in front of the North Market Hall, to 
speak in defence of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. It 
was a moment of the wildest excitement through- 
out the country. Kansas was rent by contending 
parties ; associations had been organized and armed 
North and South ; the latter to force slavery into 
that Territory, and the former to exclude it by 
force. Such was the popular indignation that 
it was determined Mr. Douglas should not be 
heard. For more than four hours he faced an 
angry and excited multitude, calm, undaunted, re- 
gardless of personal danger, attempting to speak 
in the intervals of popular clamor, and at last 
quietly retiring unheard, but not the less uncon- 
quered and unconquerable. Fellow-citizens — No 
man that ever lived could have confronted such a 
demonstration of popular disapproval, if he had 
not felt that he had done right. Courage and a 

consciousness of wrong are never companions of 

2 



i8 



each other ; and it may be safely said that there is 
not one of those who was then arrayed against him 
that will not, now that excitement and passion 
have passed away, bear testimony to the sincerity 
of his convictions, and the moral grandeur with 
which he maintained and defended them. 

The peculiar constitution of our Government, and 
the character of our people, have given an impulse 
to public speaking unknown to any other country. 
Oratory is of the natural growth of free institutions. 
There are no orators where there is no freedom 
of speech. They degenerated and disappeared in 
Greece after the era of Philip, and in Rome after 
the era of Augustus. Suffrage and education 
being nearly universal with us, all have the desire 
and the need to know whatever concerns the ad- 
ministration of public affairs. The communication 
of intelligence in regard to the designs and the 
policy of parties by the Press, is, to a great extent, 
ex parte and incomplete ; and the defect; has led to 
a practice peculiar to the United States, of holding 
assemblies of the people in which all unite for the 
purpose of discussing public questions, both sides 
being defended respectively by speakers of opposite 
opinions. This practice is general in the Western 
and Southern States, but less so in the Middle and 
Eastern. It is to be regretted that it is not uni- 
versal. Nothing can be more fair than such a 



19 



comparison and criticism of measures and opinions. 
When misstatements may be instantly corrected, 
there is no temptation to make them, as there is in 
mere party meetings ; and the facls of the case 
being undisputed, the influence of the speaker, 
apart from the merits of his cause, depends alto- 
gether on the power of his eloquence and the 
soundness of his logic. It has the advantage of 
carrying before the great tribunal of the people in 
every neighborhood (for there is scarce a locality 
in which such meetings are not held) the issues to 
be tried ; and thus before the right of suffrage is 
exercised, every man is enabled to form an intelli- 
gent understanding of the duty he is to perform. 
It was in this field of public debate that Mr. 
Douglas's oratory was to a great extent formed. 
His labors, at various periods of his life, in travers- 
ing the State for the purpose of addressing these 
assemblies of the people, are almost incredible ; and 
the influence he acquired is due, in a great degree, 
to the impression which he made on these occa- 
sions by his eloquence and his logical power. 

The most memorable of these popular canvasses, 
and one which is not likely ever again to occur, 
was that of 1858, when Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Doug- 
las, both candidates for the Senate at the time, and 
for the Presidency two years afterwards, traversed 
the State, speaking together at different places de- 



20 



signated by previous appointment, and published 
for the information of the people. The magnitude 
of the issues involved in the election of that year 
(far more vital to the peace and the permanent in- 
terests of the country than any one at that time 
could have foreseen, although subsequent events 
were even then faintly foreshadowed), the great 
ability of the speakers, the confidence reposed in 
them by the political parties which they respec- 
tively represented, and the immense multitudes 
that were drawn together to witness so extraordi- 
nary a contest, gave it an importance which no 
similar trial of intellectual power has ever attained. 
The relation in which they stood to each other and 
the whole country so soon afterwards, gives it, now 
that their earthly labors are ended, a posthumous 
character of heroism surpassing that which it pos- 
sessed at the time. They may be said with perfect 
truth to have been the nation's representatives and 
the exponents of its opinions. They were actors 
in a political drama as far transcending in grandeur 
all other popular canvasses as an epic rises in dig- 
nity above a narrative of ordinary life. 

In April, 1 86 1, when the first gun was fired upon 
Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Douglas were 
again together, the former as President, and the lat- 
ter as a Senator of the United States, taking counsel 
in regard to the measures to be adopted to vindicate 



21 



the insulted honor of the Government, to uphold 
its violated authority, and to save the Union from 
forcible dismemberment. Mr. Douglas advised the 
most ample preparations and the most vigorous ac- 
tion. I have the highest authority for saying that 
he had the entire confidence of the President ; and 
when they parted, Mr. Douglas set out on that last 
great service of traversing the Free States, and 
rousing them by his resistless eloquence to the 
great duty of maintaining the Union unbroken 
against the gigantic treason by which its existence 
was threatened. And thus these two distinguished 
men, so recently opposed to each other, came to- 
gether in friendly conference under the impulse of 
an exalted patriotism and an impending national 
peril, forgetting past differences, having no thought 
of themselves, and desirous only of knowing how 
each could do most for the common cause. It 
pleased God that both should perish in carrying 
out the great purposes of their hearts. Mr. Doug- 
las died of a disease contracted in his herculean 
efforts in canvassing the North and West in sup- 
port of the war. Mr. Lincoln died by a flagitious 
act. of cowardice and crime on the very day when 
the old flag went up on the battlements of Fort 
Sumter, amid the shouts, the congratulations, and 
the tears of the thousands who came together to 
witness this significant vindication of the national 



22 



power. Happily, the one was spared till he saw 
the people of the Free States inspired with his own 
enthusiasm in the country's cause; the other till he 
had made his name immortal by striking from the 
limbs of three million human beings the manacles 
of slavery, and seen the last hostile force surren- 
dered to the armies of the Union. 

Fellow-citizens, there is a view of this sudden re- 
volution in the social condition of the colored race 
which ought never to be overlooked. The proclama- 
tion of Mr. Lincoln, abolishing slavery, was an a6l 
of war, and extended only to the States which had 
taken up arms against the Government. It did not 
reach Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, or Tennessee, 
which remained true to their allegiance. Slavery 
still existed in those States ; and for its final extinc- 
tion, for the consummation of the great measure of 
manumission, for the obliteration of the only fea- 
ture in our political Constitution which has ever 
been regarded as inconsistent with its fundamental 
principles of freedom and equality, the country is 
indebted to the present Chief-Magistrate of the 
Union. His personal influence with the South 
has achieved what no power of the Government 
could have effected — the adoption by three-fourths 
of the States of the constitutional amendment de- 
claring slavery for ever abolished throughout the 
Union. The glory of President Lincoln was to 



23 



have emancipated, by an act of his own will, all 
slaves within the reach of his legitimate power. 
The glory of President Johnson is to have com- 
pleted what the former left unfinished, and to have 
made the Constitution what eleven of the thirteen 
original parties to it desired to make it at its for- 
mation. Two of the Slave States refused to con- 
cur in the great measure of 1865 ; and it will be 
recorded in our history as one of the marvels of 
the times that slavery was abolished in Kentucky 
and Delaware by the votes of South Carolina, Geor- 
gia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Let the fact be 
proclaimed in honor of the last-named States, and 
it need not be doubted that the time is near at 
hand when they will find, in high moral considera- 
tions and an immeasurably increased prosperity, 
cause to congratulate themselves that their names 
are enrolled in the great army of emancipators 
throughout the civilized world. 

In the State of Illinois there has been no great 
interest for a quarter of a century with which Mr. 
Douglas was not in some degree identified. His 
views were eminently conservative. He opposed all 
useless expenditures, all loose interpretations of or- 
ganic or administrative laws, all attempts to evade 
obligations resting upon legitimate compacts ; and 
yet he was always one of the foremost in advocating 
judicious internal improvements. He was particu- 



larly conspicuous for his persevering efforts to 
secure the grant of lands from the United States for 
the Illinois Central Railroad, to which so much of 
the prosperity of the State is due. It is no injustice 
to the Representatives in Congress from Illinois, to 
whose active and zealous cooperation with him that 
invaluable grant was obtained, to say that but for 
his determined opposition it would have been made 
to a private company, and not, as he insisted it 
should be, to the State. You all remember his 
earnest and long-continued exertions, extending 
through a series of years, to procure the passage of 
a bill by Congress for the construction of the Pacific 
Railroad, the most gigantic enterprise of this or any 
other age. He addressed public meetings and 
wrote papers to enforce upon the judgment of the 
country the necessity of executing a work which he 
regarded as destined to become one of the strongest 
bonds of union between the States and the people 
on the. two shores of this continent, and as essen- 
tial to the full development of our internal resources 
and our commercial capacity. He did not live to 
see the great enterprise commenced. But, thanks 
to him and those who like him foresaw its import- 
ance without being appalled by its magnitude, it 
is now in a course of rapid execution. It was 
commenced a year ago ; the track-layers passed Fort 
Kearney on the 20th of last month; they are now 



25 



more than two hundred miles west of Omaha ; they 
are more than half-way across the continent ; on the 
ist of April next this city will reach, by one un- 
broken railway communication, into the heart of 
the great plains which stretch from the Rocky 
Mountains eastward, and be within two hundred 
miles of Denver in Colorado. Of the three thousand 
three hundred miles of railroad required in this 
parallel of latitude to cross the continent, only 
one thousand three hundred will remain unfinish- 
ed. There is everv reason to believe, should no 
unforeseen event occur to retard it, that in five 
years from this time the work will be completed ; 
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the popu- 
lation on their respective shores, will be united 
by bonds of iron which no time can break ; and 
a large portion of the trade with China will be 
turned from maritime into overland channels. 
The results to which this improvement must lead, 
no human sagacity can foresee and no human 
calculation compute. 

In connection with this subject, let me call 
to your remembrance the general gloom which 
overspread the country when the late civil war 
broke out. The stoutest hearts were not with- 
out their misgivings ; and even those of us who 
never doubted the issue, and who were deter- 
mined from the beginning to fight it out to 



26 



the end, without regard to consequences, had 
our hours and days of the deepest anxiety. While 
calling out, like the Psalmist, from the depths of 
our distress, "De profundis" the gates of our valleys 
and our everlasting hills were unlocked, as if in 
response to our cry, and treasures, which had lain 
buried in the darkness of ages, were poured out 
in boundless profusion to sustain us under the enor- 
mous burdens cast upon us by the war. To 
these prolific fountains of wealth the Pacific Rail- 
road is to convey us on its way across the con- 
tinent — to the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Neva- 
da, and the lower gold and silver-bearing ranges. 
The auriferous mountain chains of Europe and 
Asia have been penetrated and ransacked for 
thousands of years for the precious metals they 
contain. Ours are, as yet, almost untouched ; and 
there is every reason to believe, I had almost said 
to fear, that the treasures which are to be developed 
and distributed among us will exceed all that 
history has pictured of the riches of the great 
Oriental empires. For let us bear in our remem- 
brance that the administration of wealth by Govern- 
ments is always a source of corruption ; that com- 
munities grow less scrupulous as they grow more 
rich ; that simplicity of manners gives way to luxury, 
and economy to extravagance ; and that rivalry in 
industry is succeeded by that worst and most de- 



moralizing of all competitions — emulation in expen- 
diture. Social evils of this sort may be endured 
and made comparatively innocuous so long as 
public legislation is pure. I say to you, then, men 
of the West, look to the purity of your representa- 
tives in your State Legislatures and in Congress. 
Let them be men of talent, if they are also men of 
integrity. But let them, first of all, be honest and 
incorruptible. It was the good fortune of Mr. 
Douglas to have borne his part in the national 
councils when incorruptibility was deemed as 
essential in a public legislator as chastity in a 
woman, and to have gone through life during the 
highest party excitement without a stain on his 
reputation in his personal or public relations. 
Impure legislation was the evil for which, above 
all others, the founders of our Government had 
the deepest concern — 

" Quod nostri timuere p aires T 

and it is on you as voters, holding in your hands 
the power of selection, that the responsibility rests 
of maintaining the stability of the Government by 
confiding its administration, and especially its legis- 
lative functions, to pure men. It has pleased the 
Sovereign Ruler of the universe to strengthen and 
uphold us in the seasons of our adversity and peril. 



28 



Let us implore Him not to leave us to ourselves 
in the more dangerous ordeal of our prosperity. 

The oratory of Mr. Douglas was marked by the 
same characteristics which distinguished him in all 
the actions of his life. It was bold, earnest, forcible, 
and impressive. It is quite manifest that he never 
chose as a model any one of the great orators of his 
own time, or of the past. It is equally certain that 
he bestowed little labor on ornament. He seems to 
have had a single object in the preparation of his 
speeches — to express his thoughts in the simplest 
and most forcible words, and to give to his hearers 
the clearest conception of his meaning ; and it was 
from the steady pursuit of this object that he ac- 
quired the extraordinary power which he possessed 
of moving other minds by pouring into them the 
overpowering convictions of his own. He never 
turned out of the direct path of logical deduction 
to run after a rhetorical figure. He never impaired 
the force of a plain proposition by loading it with 
unnecessary words. His style was the growth of 
practice in speaking rather than study ; a practice 
which began in his boyhood, and which, through 
his early appointment to offices requiring argument 
and debate, became a part of his daily life. It is 
doubtful whether any man of his age ever spoke so 
often in courts, legislative bodies, and in popular 
assemblies. He may be said to have been eminently 



2 9 



an orator of the people. His greatest power was, 
perhaps, in influencing the judgments and feelings 
of the masses. And yet in the Senate Chamber he 
was scarcely less distinguished. He was for years 
the associate in that arena of the first men of 
the Union, often their opponent in debate, and 
never comino: out of the contest without honor. 
Indeed, as a ready and effective debater, he had 
very few equals. His long and laborious training 
in the intellectual battle-fields of the West, his clear 
mental conceptions, and the direct and forcible 
rendering of his thoughts, gave him a power in 
extemporaneous discussions which few other men 
possessed. 

It is unnecessary to say to you, who knew him 
so well, that there were occasions when, under the 
influence of strong excitement, he rose to the 
very highest flights of oratory — when the passion 
by which he was moved broke out into those point- 
ed and epigrammatic utterances which live for years 
after the lips of the speaker have been closed for 
ever. Such an occasion occurred in the debate on 
the Mexican war in the House of Representatives, 
in 1 846, when he was thirty-three years of age. Some 
of the ablest and most prominent members of that 
body had denounced the war as " unholy, unright- 
eous, and damnable," when Mr. Douglas turned 
upon them with the following outburst of fiery 



30 

indignation : " Sir, I tell these gentlemen it requires 
more charity than falls to the lot of frail man to 
believe that the expression of such sentiments is 
consistent with the sincerity of their professions — 
with patriotism, honor, and duty to their country. 
Patriotism emanates from the heart; it fills the 
soul ; inspires the whole man with a devotion to 
his country's cause, and speaks and acts the same 
language. America wants no friends, acknowledges 
the fidelity of no citizen who, after war is declared, 
condemns the justice of her cause and sympathizes 
with the enemy; all such are traitors in their 
hearts, and it only remains for them to commit 
some overt act for which they may be dealt with 
according to their deserts." 

Though Mr. Douglas was always a member of 
the Democratic party, he never considered himself 
bound by his association to support measures which 
he believed wrong. His sense of right, his consci- 
entious convictions of duty, were with him oblio;a- 
tions above all party ties. It was under this high 
feeling of honor and self-respect, and with an inde- 
pendence worthy of all praise, that he broke away 
from the political associations with which he had 
been all his life identified, and denounced, resisted, 
and opposed with all the resistless energy of his 
character and with all the earnestness of his elo- 
quence, what he denominated the Lecompton fraud. 



3i 



There can be no higher evidence of his stern inte- 
grity than his course on this occasion ; no better 
illustration of the truth, that, though party ties may 
bind us on questions of mere expediency, no honest 
man will hesitate to break away from them when the 
alternative is to do, on a question of principle, what 
he feels to be wrong. 

The last public appearance of Mr. Douglas 
was on two occasions, one immediately succeeding 
the other. On his return to this State, after the 
attack on Fort Sumter, he addressed the members 
of the Legislature at their request, denouncing 
the rebellion, urging the oblivion of all party dif- 
erences, appealing to his political friends and op- 
ponents to unite in support of the Government, 
and calling on the people to come in their 
strength to its rescue from the perils which sur- 
rounded it, and preserve the Union from being 
broken up by force of arms. In a speech to the 
people of Chicago, six days afterwards, the same 
earnest appeals were made to them to lay aside all 
considerations but that of preserving the Govern- 
ment of their fathers. On this occasion he was 
received by all parties with demonstrations of re- 
spect surpassing in enthusiasm, if possible, all other 
of the great ovations of his life. These speeches, 
though pregnant with the most determined spirit, 
and with an undoubting faith in the issue of the 



32 



contest, were obviously made under great depres- 
sion of feeling. He had been one of the most con- 
sistent, resolute, and efficient defenders of the con- 
stitutional rights of the Southern States. He had 
done everything that justice and magnanimity dic- 
tated to sustain them. To the members of the 
Legislature he said : " Whatever errors I have 
committed, have been leaning too far to the South- 
ern section of the Union against my own ; " to the 
people of Chicago, that he had gone " to the utmost 
extremity of magnanimity and generosity," and that 
the return was " war upon the Government." It 
was this sense of the inutility of his own personal 
sacrifices and labors, and the ungenerous return on 
the part of those for whom he, and others acting 
with him, had done so much, that embittered the 
last days of his life and aggravated the disease un- 
der which he was laboring. A vein of sadness 
runs through these two last speeches, and seems 
now, as we look back to the events speedily follow- 
ing them, a preflguration of his approaching death. 
On these two intellectual efforts his reputation may 
well rest, as examples of the purest patriotism and 
of an undying faith in the ultimate triumph of the 
cause of the Union. 

A few hundred yards west of us, shut out from 
our sight by an intervening grove, stands the 
Chicago University. In the magnitude of its extent, 



the massiveness of its architecture and its well- 
balanced proportions, it is not only an ornament to 
this city, but a living testimonial of the liberality 
with which private wealth has contributed to the 
cause of science. Two hundred students are re- 
ceiving instruction within its walls from a learned 
and accomplished faculty ; and from its noble obser- 
vatory astronomy holds nightly consultations with 
the heavenly bodies. The ample grounds, in the 
centre of which the institution stands, were the 
munificent gift of Mr. Douglas, whose name the 
main edifice bears. The instruction, which in his 
youth he labored so hard to obtain, he wished to 
see fully extended to the young men of this city and 
State. And thus shall the two structures — that of 
which he was one of the enlightened and liberal 
founders, and this of which you have laid the foun- 
dation to-day — stand side by side, we trust for ages 
to come, as great landmarks of civilization on the 
shore of Lake Michigan, where little more than a 
quarter of a century ago majestic nature from the 
beginning of time had not yet been roused from 
her silent and solitary sleep. 

And now, fellow-citizens, our task is done — mine 
in this brief and imperfect delineation of the 
character and review of the services of • Mr. 
Douglas ; yours in laying deep in the solid earth 
the foundation-stone of the structure which is to 



bear his name, and stand for centuries as a 
memorial to your children of one whose talents, 
political and personal integrity, and devotion to 
the public welfare, you would wish them to know 
and to emulate. In the changefulness of human 
things the time may come when the stone which is 
to surmount and crown it may be brought down to 
the level of that which has been laid at its base to- 
day. For families and races and empires and 
communities must, in the future as in the past, run 
their course and perish. But great actions, great 
virtues, and great thoughts, emanations and attri- 
butes of the spiritual life, types of the immortality 
which is to come, shall live on when all the monu- 
ments that men contrive and fashion and build up 
to perpetuate remembrances of themselves, shall, 
like them, have crumbled into their primeval dust. 
One of the great poets of the Augustan era, nearly 
nineteen hundred years ago, boasted that his 
works should live as long as the priest with the 
silent virgin should ascend the capitolium. Of the 
millions of treasure lavished upon the decoration 
of the capitol, no trace remains ; its very site was 
long disputed ; and priests and virgins, with the 
knowledge of the mysteries they celebrated, have 
been buried for more than a thousand years in the 
darkest oblivion. But the immortal verse, in all its 
purity and grace, still lives, and will make the name 



35 



and genius of its author familiar until the records 
of human thought shall be obliterated and lost. 
Thus shall the name of him, whose memory you 
are honoring, be as imperishable as the history of 
the State in whose service he lived and died ; borne 
on its annals as one who was identified with its 
progress and improvements ; who illustrated the 
policy and the social spirit of the great West ; who 
gained strength and influence from its support and 
confidence ; and who gloried in its energy, and its 
unconquerable enterprise. He will be remembered 
above all for those heroic words, the last he ever 
uttered, worthy to be graven on stone and treasured 
to the end of time in all patriotic hearts — words 
that come to us, as we stand around his grave, 
with a solemnity and a pathos which no language 
can express. When his wife bent over him as his 
spirit was departing, and asked him if he had any- 
thing to say to his children ; forgetting himself, his 
domestic ties, everything precious in life from which 
he was about to be severed — thinking only of his 
country, rent by civil strife, and overshadowed by 
impenetrable darkness — he replied : " Tell them 
to obey the laws and support the Constitution of 
the Union." 



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